Characteristics of an ecopoetics
Some characteristics of an ecopoetics (ecological understanding)
1. Interrelatedness
‘Everything is connected to everything else.’ Barry Commoner (his first law of ecology).[v]
Michael Branch supposes the basic premise of ‘ecosophy’ (a neologism, contracting 'ecophilosophy' etymologically emphasising Sophia rather than the 'science' of nature) is interconnection.[vi]
Les Murray suggests, '[E]cological consciousness ... is a new form of a very ancient sense of the interrelatedness of all things.’[vii] It is an indigenous epistemology; Abram, discussing traditional cultures in the Amazon, notes, ‘human and non-human life-worlds interpenetrate and inform one another.’[viii] The poet Gary Snyder expands on this observation, relating ecological interrelatenedness with Buddhist teaching (Indra’s Net in Avatamsaka Sutra).[ix]
In traditional cultures, humans, plants, animals, ancestor spirits and even material, such as rock, all may be endowed with consciousness and a soul (Indigenous monism). The ethnographic record thus resists the imposition of a nature/culture dualism.
Link to natural theology Rhizome Great Chain of Being (hierachical) Science has been successful through reductive but must make effort for holistic and processural approaches.
2. Bio / Eco-centric
If interrelated, this follows.
We are the centre of the universe, our media conversations, dominated by what people have done and are doing.
We are separated from nature - urbasnisation
Lynn Whitecontroversially points the finger at Christianity as the most anthropocentric religion the world has known and thus the root cause of the ecological crisis in the West.[x] There may be tension between the two creation accounts in Genesis 1 and 2, between the command to "rule" and "subdue" the land and the command to "work" and "take care of" it. But, overall the Bible has a poor record in ecological understanding and environmental care.
This is not the same as anti-humanist. The structuralists and poststructuralists (Foucault and Derrida, for example) had attacked humanism, as a way of understanding man at the centre to explain change, ideology, power etc. A reaction came about when Heidegger's Nazi views were revealed, and Eastern European dissidents fought for human rights. Les Murray remarks in a review of Eric Rolls, that he ‘treats his human and non-human agents pretty much on a par.'[xi] This denial of the tradition of anthropocentrism (now universal since a hunter/gatherer relationship to land and biota is ending) is key to the ecological approach.
3. Place - the Ordinary not Sublime: the Local, rarely Global
Place underpins the local and the ordinary - Bioregionalism
There is a sense that the perception and description of ordinary things is valuable. An eco-approach is generally grounded in 'local knowledge' - experiential, intimate, first-hand yet with a wide reach.
Natural everyday events are of interest, both phenomenologically as authentic experience, and as part of ongoing processes. The ordinary, unlike the sublime is a communal, not solitary experience. The social aspect is important, whereas Romantic nature poetry focussed on the solitary poet communing with nature (eg. Hazlitt, ‘On Going a Journey’, 1822).[xii]
There is still a place for curiosity and for wonder. Daston and Park call the period around the turn of 16th/17th C, the ‘age of wonder’ which drove an, ‘alternative grand narrative for the Scientific Revolution.’[xiii] Curiosities became ‘objects of philosophical analysis . . . the focus of a self-conscious sensibility, and . . . a nexus of cultural symbols’ in natural philosophy, medicine, literature, and art.’ [xiv] But ordinary experiences are richer and more complex than one realises.[xv] The natural world is so marvellous that Goethe was tempted to abandon language.[xvi]
4. Alert to one’s presence within the external World
It helps to have, what Barry Lopez calls, an ‘authentic story’, with ‘the power to reorder a state of psychological confusion through contact with the pervasive truth of those relationships we call ‘the land’.[xvii] It also helps to put books aside some of the time.[xviii]
The materiality, one’s materials as an artist
Horticulturalists, gardeners, and deep ecologists all want all the details of what’s under our feet.[xix]
Hussey thought Gilpin in Remarks on Forest Scenery was ‘remarkable’ in his attunement to ‘impressionistic views of nature in 1791’ but finally ‘disappointing that he should not have the courage to insist on artistic truth... A revolution was required... Picturesque theory eventually achieved this liberty. But not through Gilpin. It was Constable and Turner who were the liberators.’ (Turner painted the picturesque ruins of Tintern in the 1820s). However, the Picturesque paved the way for Romanticism in terms of emphasis on the experiential and the natural world, like the theory of the Sublime had previously, but more democratically. These experiences, within anyone’s reach, brought the natural environment into cultural discourse.
Gilpin was remarkably attentive, and to much more than the picturesque; Bate does him a disservice.
5. Contingency – open to process. What is happening, what is present
‘To be alive is to participate in a continuous stream of influences from the outer world and acts on the outer world, in which we are merely the transitional stage.’
Norbert Wiener[xx]
What is passing? What is arriving? What is leaving?
A processural view involves a fundamental shift in our understanding of the word nature, and is expressed as 'flux of nature', rather than 'balance of nature' metaphor.
A new concept, like luck, as opposed to fate
Winch, magic
Also imp for sense of dynamism in ecoprocesses and systems.
Matt Ridley nature vs Nurture, genes give opportunities, work with environment, in dialectic of genes, development and skilled practice shows how imp the environment is.
6. Multisensorial, not visually obsessive
A genuinely ecological approach does not work to attain a mentally envisioned future, but strives to enter, ever more deeply, into the sensorial present. David Abram[xxi]
Diversity a key issue, in diff senses
Technology only working with 2, primarily vision, our visual culture
7. Self aware not self obsessed
We must be aware of our personal, community and nation state practices (and policies) in relation to the natural environment and sustainability, some self-reflexivity is necessary, awareness of ecol footprints
An awareness of one’s own acts within the environment in relation to others and the biota and then to acknowledge one’s voice is multi faceted. (Peter Fritzell lists some permutations).[xxii]
8. Diversity, appreciation of, and diversity of knowledge
Australia has the world’s highest number of reptile species
fifth highest number of flowering plants
tenth highest number of amphibians
7% of the world’s 6 million (or so) species (more than double Europe and north America combined)
the most number (with Madagascar) of endemic terrestrial vertebrates and flowering plants.
More than 80% of Australian species are endemic – since Australia separated from Gondwanaland 45 mill years ago.
· mammals 90%
· birds 70%
· flowering plants 85%
· reptiles 88%
· frogs 92%
· fish 25%
9. Political & Responsible
An ecopoetry fights for the preservation of natural systems, processes and etc,
10. Cultural Diversity – we can’t leave humans out of the equation
[i] Peter Porter admits in ‘On First Looking into Chapman’s Hesiod’: ‘And the same blunt patriotrism, / A long-winded, emphatic, kelpie yapping / About our land, our time, our fate, our strange / And singular way of moons and showers, lakes / Filling oddly – yes, Australians are Boeotians, . .’ Lawrence Bourke’s A Vivid Steady State, NSW University Press, Sydney, 1992, p27. Raymond Williams' The Country and the City, London: Chatto & Windus, 1973 traces the shifting symbolism and imagery of the country and the city from the Middle Ages to mid- twentieth century. 'City' is a synonym for civilisation but as a recent review of the scholarship reveals, country and city are not really separate entities, but their boundaries are ‘permeable.’ See MacLean, Donna Landry, and Joseph P. Ward, Eds., The Country and the City Revisited: England and the Politics of Culture, 1550-1850. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1999, p4.
[ii] Les Murray - the poet not the soccer commentator - is an unexpected star of the Australian Tourist Commission's new series of ads flogging Australia as a holiday destination. Murray's commercial includes his narration of his popular poem, The Dream of Wearing Shorts Forever, and was shot at his property hideaway on the mid-North Coast. Murray, who appears in the ad in front of patchwork tiles in his living room, said that The Dream of Wearing Shorts Forever is more "a theory of costume" in its various forms, than a personal ode to wearing them. "I haven't had the figure to wear shorts since I was a kid," he said. "I think the only shorts I own are the ones I wear at the sea because the sea has the same indifference to fashion just like me." Jeni Porter, Shorts the main feature, Sydney Morning Herald, May 22, 2004
[iii] In an interview, Noel Carrol asked, ‘What about this distinction between Boeotian and Athenian poetry?’ Murray replied, ‘That was a kind of half-joking, half-serious argument that he {Porter] pursued. I raised it in a poem called “The Returnees,” and he took it up and developed it in a poem called “On First Looking into Chapman’s Hesiod,” and then I wrote an essay on that called “On Sitting Back and Thinking About Porter’s Boeotia,” talking about this distinction which I think runs through all of Western civilisation between decentralised culture on, say, the Aboriginal or Celtic model, and metropolitan centralized culture, opting for the former and pointing Peter out as an example of the latter.’ Noel Peacock, ‘‘Embracing the Vernacular’: An Interview with Les A. Murray’, Australian and New Zealand Studies in Canada 7, 1992.
[iv] Les Murray, ‘Peter Porter: 'On First Looking into Chapman's Hesiod’ in Elkin, P. K. Ed., Australian Poems in Perspective. St. Lucia, Brisbane: U of Queensland P, 1978, p 171-84. Ken Goodwin defines it as, ‘rural, even provincial; directly related to the land; concerned with religion and its ritual rather than with the abstractions of philosophy; based on the family rather than the political unit, and egalitarian rather than rigidly democratic.’ In ‘Les Murray’ in A History of Australian Literature. London: MacMillan, 1986, p 215.
[v] Barry Commoner’s, The Closing Circle: Nature, Man & Technology, (1971) soon became a classic.
[vi] Michael Branch, ‘Ecocriticism: The Nature of Nature in Literary Theory and Practice’, Weber Studies: An Interdisciplinary Humanities Journal 11:1, 1994, p 41. http://weberstudies.weber.edu/archive/Vol.%2011.1/11.1Branch.htm. [DL 2, 2000]. He notes ecosophy has a 'basic premise of interconnection, which poststructuralist theory often conceives of as 'intertextuality’ which subverts anthropocentrism. p44, 46. But this is misleading; the term was devised in 1966 by Julia Kristeva to bolster structuralist thought and subvert any notion of subjectivity. Intertextuality refers to a text being 'constructed from a mosaic of quotations, any text is the absorption and transformation of another.' Most green theorists are actively hostile to postmodern theory. (‘So much literary scholarship is unreadable garbage, apparently not intended for a real audience.’ Scott Slovic, ‘Ecocriticism: Storytelling, Values, Communication, Contact’, 1994.
http://www.asle.umn.edu/conf/other_conf/wla/1994/slovic.html DL 23.4.2001. Dominic Head thinks eco-thought can work with postmodern approaches. Dominic Head, ‘The (Im)possibility of Ecocriticism’ in Writing the Environment Ed., Kerridge and Sammells, 1998, p27-39. >
[vii] Les Murray, 'Eric Rolls and the Golden Disobedience' in Les Murray, The Quality of Sprawl, Duffy & Snellgrove, 1999, p199
[viii] David Abram, The Spell of the Sensuous: perception and language in a more-than-human world,
Pantheon, 1996, p144.
[ix] Gary Snyder, 'Plain Talk', Turtle Island, 1974, p129. >‘Insights into nature from Buddhism or from physics and ecology may at first seem foreign to the poetic tradition of the west, we must bear in mind . . that culture, like nature, is ‘a structure of evolving processes . . .[and] wisdom is the fruit of a balanced development.’ John Elder, Imagining the Earth: Poetry and the Vision of Nature, U of Illinois P, 1985, p4. Quoting Alfred North Whitehead from Science and the Modern World
[x] following the publication of landmark essay on “The Historical Roots of our Ecologic Crisis,”White, 1968: 75-105.
[xi] Les Murray, ‘Eric Rolls’, 1999, p199.
[xii] Hazlitt mentions an enchanted spot on the road to Llangollen, Wales, in a river valley, ‘but I would return to it alone. What other self could I find to share that influx of thought, of regret, and delight, the fragments of which I could hardly conjure up myself – so much have they been broken and defaced.’ Selected Essays of William Hazlitt, Ed., Geoffrey Keynes, Nonesuch Press, 1970, p79.
[xiii] Lorraine Daston and Katherine Park Wonders and the Order of Nature, 1150-1750, New York: Zone Books, 1998, p18.
[xiv] Daston and Katherine Park, 1998, p172.
[xv] John McDermott mentions Oliver Sacks’ Awakening and a case Luria mentions, noting, ‘The richness of the everyday, had we the will to savour our possibilities, would far exceed our fantasies.’ John J McDermott, Streams of Experience . . U of Massachusetts P, 1986, p146. >
[xvi] Goethe (c1800) wrote, ‘We talk far too much. We should talk less and draw more. I personally should like to renounce speech altogether and, like organic Nature, communicate everything I have to say in sketches. That fig tree, this little snake, the cocoon on my window sill quietly awaiting its future — all these are momentous signatures. A person able to decipher their meaning properly would soon be able to dispense with the written or the spoken word altogether. The more I think of it, there is something futile, mediocre, even (I am tempted to say) foppish about speech.’ Quoted in Aldous Huxley, The Doors of Perception, New York: Harper & Row, 1954, p73-4.
[xvii] Barry Lopez in essay ‘Landscape and Narrative’ in Crossing Open Ground, Vintage Books, 1989, p68.
[xviii] Scott Slovic visited an eighty-four-year-old farmer/philosopher Masanobu Fukuoka, the author of The One-Straw Revolution, in the mountains outside of Matsuyama on the southern island of Shikoku. While drinking tea Slovic asked, ‘Did he think it might be possible for the university to contribute anything to our understanding of nature? (What did he think about these three literature professors who had come to visit him?) Fukuoka-san seemed to look right past me, and then he said (in Japanese), "Listen to the bird sing." I thought he simply hadn't heard my question or that he found it unimportant. But everyone stopped talking and, sure enough, there was a nightingale (‘uguisu’ in Japanese) calling outside the hut. Then Fukuoka-san's assistant leaned over to me and whispered, ‘He means, it is possible if you have a simple mind.’ In other words, those of us who work at universities might be able to contribute to society's understanding of nature if we remember to pay attention to nature itself, if we don't lose ourselves in lectures, theories, texts, laboratories. A powerful admonition: ecocritics need contact not just with literature and not just with each other, but with the physical world.’ 1994.
[xix] The deep ecologist George Sessions in a section of ‘The genius loci and the Australian Landscape’ called ‘Respect the Soil’ begins ‘Study the soil’. In Landprints, CUP, 1997, p116.
[xx] Norbert Wiener, The Human Use of Human Beings: Cybernetics and Society, (1950) Sphere Books, Great Britain, 1968, p107.
[xxi] David Abram, The Spell of the Sensuous, (1996), Vintage Books, 1997, p272.
[xxii] Peter Fritzell ‘To present the environmentalist’s point of view in a personal voice. To immerse the person, the personal voice, in an environment. To deny the self and affirm the environment. To deny the environment and celebrate the self. To view the self as a product of the environment and the environment as a product of the self. To view the self as a metaphor for the environment . . .‘ Peter Fritzell, Nature Writing and America: Essays upon a Cultural Type, U of Iowa P, 1990, p189.
[xxiii] David Abram, The Spell of the Sensuous, (1996), Vintage Books, 1997, p272.